Number-crunching approach doesn't work for everything

September 20, 2009|BY ART MARMORSTEIN, Aberdeen

More bad news for President Obama. A survey released by Public Policy Polling shows that 8 percent of New Jersey voters think the president is the anti-Christ. Another 13 percent indicated that they were unsure of whether he was the anti-Christ or not. What has to be worrisome for Obama and his supporters is that it's not just conservative Republicans who believe Obama is in league with the darkest of dark forces: 19 percent of those who self-identify as political moderates, 13 percent of those who call themselves Democrats, and 10 percent of those who claim to have voted for Obama in the last election say that the president is, or at least might be, the anti-Christ. The demographic cross-tabs suggest particular problems for Obama among Hispanics, with 24 percent of Hispanic respondents saying they think Obama is the anti-Christ. Young voters (those in the 20-29 age bracket) respond similarly. Is Obama anti-Christ? Nearly one of four young New Jersey voters say he is. Now what is going on here? Some of this is a quite understandable reaction to the personality cult that has grown up around the president. Fawning media coverage and (even more) things like the creepy Demi Moore/Ashton Kutcher “I pledge” video radiate the “my-leader-is-god” attitude that, throughout history, Christian people have regarded as, at least in spirit, a sign of the anti-Christ. And it's not at all unusual for people to interpret the otherwise-inexplicable rise of a leader from obscurity to power as the result of some sort of league with the devil. If Joan of Arc weren't a witch, how could she have beaten the English? But I suspect that what's really going on here is that many people are having fun with the pollsters. One blogger says that, if a pollster asked him such a silly question, he'd say “Oh, yeah, definitely the anti-Christ.” If asked where he thought Obama was born, he'd say, “The third planet in Epsilon-Bootes.” But people don't give silly answers just for amusement. Many people are sick and tired, not just of pollsters, but of the number-crunching approach to life in general - an approach that, more and more, decision makers everywhere have chosen to adopt. The academic world particularly is filled with number-crunching stupidity. We gather all sorts of data just to show that pre-school children are afraid of snakes and spiders, to find out that men like violent video games more than women do and to discover that people who can't afford cars are more likely than others to use public transportation. We gather numbers to show that happy people tend to be healthier people, to show that accidents are no more common on Friday the 13th than on any other Friday and to show that depression-sufferers tend to improve slightly when they get married. Much human behavior is simply too complex for a number-crunching approach to work. But the bureaucrats who control our lives are insatiable: Give us numbers, give us numbers. More numbers. Six. Better numbers. Six. Take a number. Six. Get a number. No buying and selling (or anything else) without a number. So are bureaucratic number-crunchers anti-Christs? Oh, yeah. Definitely anti-Christs. Obama brought them with him from Epsilon-Bootes. Art Marmorstein, Aberdeen, is a professor of history at NSU. He can be reached by writing the American News at P.O. Box 4430, Aberdeen, S.D. 57402, or by e-mail at americannews@aberdeennews.com. His column runs occasionally. The views presented are those of the author and do not represent those of Northern State University.